You play BEL/S, a magical firewall: a fire elemental that is bound with C++ code. It takes place in a world where magic and technology overlap. There is a new wave of mages called open sorcerers who write spells with code. BEL/S defends a network of four places from everything from malware to poltergeists.

Gameplay is investigative. Malicious spirits cause problems, but they're invisible until you scan for them. To scan successfully you have to identify aspects of the spirit by examining the effect it's having on the environment. Water spirits make things wet. Chaos spirits create confusion. Once you've correctly identified a spirit's matter and motive you can see it.

The larger game is deciding how BEL/S develops as a consciousness, which is determined by how she deals with the spirits she finds. She can burn them with fire, turn them all into tinder to fuel her power. She can talk to them and learn new things. She can ask other people for help and deepen the relationships she has with the people around her. BEL/S can grow in many different directions and the game has many different endings.

Cutting Off the Branches: There are multiple endings, but four of the achievements are marked "Canon". Any sequels will assume that sequence of events was the real one.

Dark Is Not Evil: Matter only determines the method by which a spirit carries out its actions. The actions themselves depend on its motive. There are multiple explicitly Dark spirits in the game, and while several are actively malicious, many others can also be befriended.

Developers' Foresight: When fighting the Hungry Ghost, you can use almost any matter, motive and resource that you have, in any combination, to unique result.

Fun with Acronyms: As part of the "occult computer science" theme, TCP stands for Telepathic Communications Protocol and HTML stands for Hypertext Magical Language.

Gameplay and Story Integration: Janet treats BEL/S with a friendly and humanising manner from the start, while the professionally-minded Decker is wary of her emerging sentience. This is reflected in that Janet's relationship meter starts out higher and increases more easily.

Genki Girl: Downplayed. Janet uses emoticons in her telepathic "speech", has the username @ThatsJanet where every human except Decker's colleagues uses their unadorned first name, and is generally upbeat and outgoing in contrast to the stoic Decker.

Healing Hands: Although Decker is the older and generally more experienced magician, he notes that Janet is better at healing than he is.

Heroic Sacrifice: Trying to fight the Hungry Ghost while having equivalent or lesser power results in this.

Hell Is That Noise: The game is almost entirely silent, apart from computery whirrs whenever BEL/S is rebooting or performing a scan. This makes the blaring alarm when an incoming death curse appears stand out all the more.

Title Drop: In BEL/S Readme file it mentions that she is open sorcery.

The Unpronounceable: Toby and Sarah pronounce BEL/S's name as "Bells". BEL/S may object to this at one point. Magicians and other spirits seem to pronounce the / just fine.

What Measure Is A Nonhuman: BEL/S can kill nearly any of the spirits she encounters without repercussion. BEL/S herself is seen as a simple program, and Decker can and will shut her down without regrets if he thinks she's going too far.

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